Download or read book Language Shift in the Coastal Marshes of Louisiana written by Kevin James Rottet and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 2001 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the twentieth century numerous ethnic cultures and languages have been threatened by increasing globalization. French Louisiana, a vibrant and diverse region that has been culturally and linguistically distinct from its neighbors for over two centuries, has not been spared this trend. Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes, which comprise the coastal marsh area, have been described as strongholds of tradition, in which large numbers of people have continued to speak Cajun French. Yet a closer examination reveals that widespread bilingualism is drawing to a close, with very few young people able to speak French at all. This book examines the intergenerational decline of French in the coastal marsh area, including changes taking place in the structure of the language in what appears to be its terminal phase.
Download or read book French on Shifting Ground written by Nathalie Dajko and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In French on Shifting Ground: Cultural and Coastal Erosion in South Louisiana, Nathalie Dajko introduces readers to the lower Lafourche Basin, Louisiana, where the land, a language, and a way of life are at risk due to climate change, environmental disaster, and coastal erosion. Louisiana French is endangered all around the state, but in the lower Lafourche Basin the shift to English is accompanied by the equally rapid disappearance of the land on which its speakers live. French on Shifting Ground allows both scholars and the general public to get an overview of how rich and diverse the French language in Louisiana is, and serves as a key reminder that Louisiana serves as a prime repository for Native and heritage languages, ranking among the strongest preservation regions in the southern and eastern US. Nathalie Dajko outlines the development of French in the region, highlighting the features that make it unique in the world and including the first published comparison of the way it is spoken by the local American Indian and Cajun populations. She then weaves together evidence from multiple lines of linguistic research, years of extensive participant observation, and personal narratives from the residents themselves to illustrate the ways in which language—in this case French—is as fundamental to the creation of place as is the physical landscape. It is a story at once scholarly and personal: the loss of the land and the concomitant loss of the language have implications for the academic community as well as for the people whose cultures—and identities—are literally at stake.
Download or read book Language in Louisiana written by Nathalie Dajko and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2019-08-01 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributions by Lisa Abney, Patricia Anderson, Albert Camp, Katie Carmichael, Christina Schoux Casey, Nathalie Dajko, Jeffery U. Darensbourg, Dorian Dorado, Connie Eble, Daniel W. Hieber, David Kaufman, Geoffrey Kimball, Thomas A. Klingler, Bertney Langley, Linda Langley, Shane Lief, Tamara Lindner, Judith M. Maxwell, Rafael Orozco, Allison Truitt, Shana Walton, and Robin White Louisiana is often presented as a bastion of French culture and language in an otherwise English environment. The continued presence of French in south Louisiana and the struggle against the language's demise have given the state an aura of exoticism and at the same time have strained serious focus on that language. Historically, however, the state has always boasted a multicultural, polyglot population. From the scores of indigenous languages used at the time of European contact to the importation of African and European languages during the colonial period to the modern invasion of English and the arrival of new immigrant populations, Louisiana has had and continues to enjoy a rich linguistic palate. Language in Louisiana: Community and Culture brings together for the first time work by scholars and community activists, all experts on the cutting edge of research. In sixteen chapters, the authors present the state of languages and of linguistic research on topics such as indigenous language documentation and revival; variation in, attitudes toward, and educational opportunities in Louisiana’s French varieties; current research on rural and urban dialects of English, both in south Louisiana and in the long-neglected northern parishes; and the struggles more recent immigrants face to use their heritage languages and deal with language-based regulations in public venues. This volume will be of value to both scholars and general readers interested in a comprehensive view of Louisiana’s linguistic landscape.
Download or read book If I Could Turn My Tongue Like That written by Thomas Klingler and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2003-08-01 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If I Could Turn My Tongue Like That, by Thomas Klingler, is an in-depth study of the Creole language spoken in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana, a community situated on the west bank of the Mississippi River above Baton Rouge that dates back to the early eighteenth century. The first comprehensive grammatical description of this particular variety of Louisiana Creole, Klingler's work is timely indeed, since most Creole speakers in the Pointe Coupee area are over sixty-five and the language is not being passed on to younger generations. It preserves and explains an important yet little understood part of America's cultural heritage that is rapidly disappearing. The heart of the book is a detailed morphosyntactic description based on some 150 hours of interviews with Pointe Coupee Creole speakers. Each grammatical feature is amply illustrated with contextual examples, and Klingler's descriptive framework will facilitate comparative research. The author also provides historical and sociolinguistic background information on the region, examining economic, demographic, and social conditions that contributed to the formation and spread of Creole in Louisiana. Pointe Coupee Creole is unusual, and in some cases unique, because of such factors as the parish's early exposure to English, its rapid development of a plantation economy, and its relative insulation from Cajun French. The volume concludes with transcriptions and English translations of Creole folk tales and of Klingler's conversations with Pointe Coupee's residents, a treasure trove of cultural and linguistic raw data. This kind of rarely printed material will be essential in preserving Creole in the future. Encylopedic in its approach and featuring a comprehensive bibliography, If I Could Turn My Tongue Like That is a rich resource for those interested in the development of Louisiana Creole and in Francophony.
Download or read book Roots of Creole Structures written by Susanne Michaelis and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reflects an ongoing shift in the study of contact languages: After a period of history-free universalism, it directs the attention to the individual historical circumstances under which the pidgin and creole languages arose. The contributions deal with different areas of language structure including phonology, morphology, and syntax, providing a wealth of structural and sociohistorical data that any comprehensive theory of contact languages will have to account for. Each of the papers provides a thorough description of a structural phenomenon against the background of the sociohistorical contact situation. The languages covered in the book are: Guiné-Bissau Creole, Haitian Creole, Hawai'i Creole, Indo-Portuguese creoles, Jamaican Creole, Lingua Franca, North American French, Mauritian Creole, Santomense, Saramaccan, Seychelles Creole, Sranan, Surinamese Maroon creoles, Vincentian Creole, and Zamboangueño Chavacano.
Download or read book Last Stand of the Louisiana Shrimpers written by Emma Christopher Lirette and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2022-08-24 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, shrimpers on the Louisiana coast have faced a historically dire shrimp season, with the price of shrimp barely high enough to justify trawling. Yet, many of them wouldn’t consider leaving shrimping behind, despite having transferrable skills that could land them jobs in the oil and gas industry. Since 2001, shrimpers have faced increasing challenges to their trade: an influx of shrimp from southeast Asia, several traumatic hurricane seasons, and the largest oil spill at sea in American history. In Last Stand of the Louisiana Shrimpers, author Emma Christopher Lirette traces how Louisiana Gulf Coast shrimpers negotiate land and blood, sea and freedom, and economic security and networks of control. This book explores what ties shrimpers to their boats and nets. Despite feeling trapped by finances and circumstances, they have created a world in which they have agency. Lirette provides a richly textured view of the shrimpers of Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, calling upon ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, interdisciplinary scholarship, and critical theory. With evocative, lyrical prose, she argues that in persisting to trawl in places that increasingly restrict their way of life, shrimpers build fragile, quietly defiant worlds, adapting to a constantly changing environment. In these flickering worlds, shrimpers reimagine what it means to work and what it means to make a living.
Download or read book French on Shifting Ground written by Nathalie Dajko and published by . This book was released on 2020-12 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In French on Shifting Ground: Cultural and Coastal Erosion in South Louisiana, Nathalie Dajko introduces readers to the lower Lafourche Basin, Louisiana, where the land, a language, and a way of life are at risk due to climate change, environmental disaster, and coastal erosion. Louisiana French is endangered all around the state, but in the lower Lafourche Basin the shift to English is accompanied by the equally rapid disappearance of the land on which its speakers live. French on Shifting Ground allows both scholars and the general public to get an overview of how rich and diverse the French language in Louisiana is, and serves as a key reminder that Louisiana serves as a prime repository for Native and heritage languages, ranking among the strongest preservation regions in the southern and eastern US. Nathalie Dajko outlines the development of French in the region, highlighting the features that make it unique in the world and including the first published comparison of the way it is spoken by the local American Indian and Cajun populations. She then weaves together evidence from multiple lines of linguistic research, years of extensive participant observation, and personal narratives from the residents themselves to illustrate the ways in which language-in this case French-is as fundamental to the creation of place as is the physical landscape. It is a story at once scholarly and personal: the loss of the land and the concomitant loss of the language have implications for the academic community as well as for the people whose cultures-and identities-are literally at stake"--
Download or read book Phonological Variation in French written by Randall Scott Gess and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2012 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a selection of French varieties representing the great diversity of this language along geographical, social, and stylistic dimensions. Twelve illustrations from regions as far removed as Western Canada and Central Africa represent widely divergent social contexts of language use. Each chapter is based on original surveys conducted within the framework of the Phonology of Contemporary French project, described in the Introduction. These surveys constitute an invaluable source of new data for researchers, as many of the varieties included are otherwise undocumented in any systematic way. The chapters follow a similar format: presentation of the survey(s) and the sociolinguistic dimensions of the variety studied; description of the phonological inventory of the system(s), principal allophonic realizations, phonotactic constraints, behavior of schwa, behavior of liaison consonants, and other notable characteristics. The book opens with an informative introduction and closes with a chapter providing a synthesis of the major findings by continent.
Download or read book Aspects of Multilingual Aphasia written by Martin R. Gitterman and published by Multilingual Matters. This book was released on 2012-06-20 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a broad overview of current research and thought on aphasia in individuals who speak more than one language. The range of topics covered, and their in-depth treatment, should be of interest to researchers, clinicians, and students.
Download or read book History Society and Variation written by J. Clancy Clements and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2006-07-19 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a collection of new articles by sixteen specialists in the field of pidgin and creole studies, assembled in honor of the world-renowned creolist, Albert Valdman. The articles, written from a variety of theoretical perspectives, are organized thematically in three sections: on the history of specific pidgins or creoles (including Louisiana Creole and Haitian Creole); on the sociohistorical settings that gave rise to these contact languages and issues affecting their future development; and on issues of linguistic variation and change. In keeping with Valdman’s own primary interests, the French-based creoles receive the most attention, including both those of the Atlantic zone and those of the Indian Ocean, but the volume also presents significant scholarship on English- and Portuguese-based varieties.
Download or read book Varieties of Spoken French written by Sylvain Detey and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-14 with total page 595 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the variation found in modern spoken French, based on the research programme 'Phonology of Contemporary French' (Phonologie du Français Contemporain, PFC). Extensive data are drawn from all over the French-speaking world, including Algeria, Canada, Louisiana, Mauritius, and Switzerland. Although the principal focus is on differences in pronunciation, the authors also analyse the spoken language at all levels from sound to meaning. The book is accompanied by a website hosting audio-visual material for teaching purposes, data, and a variety of tools for working with corpora. The first part of the book outlines some key concepts and approaches to the description of spoken French. Chapters in Part II are devoted to the study of individual samples of spoken French from all over the world, covering phonological and grammatical features as well as lexical and cultural aspects. A class-friendly ready-to-use multimedia version of these 17 chapters as well as a full transcription of each extract is provided, with the sound files also available on the book's companion website. Part III looks at inter and intra-speaker variation: it begins with chapters that provide the methodological background to the study of phonological variation using databases, while in the second section, authors present case studies of a number of PFC survey points, including Paris, the Central African Republic, and Québec. Varieties of Spoken French will be an invaluable resource for researchers, teachers, and students of all aspects of French language and linguistics.
Download or read book Languages and Dialects in the U S written by Marianna Di Paolo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-03-05 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Languages and Dialects in the U.S. is a concise introduction to linguistic diversity in the U.S. for students with little to no background in linguistics. The goal of the editors of this collection of fourteen chapters, written by leading experts on the language varieties discussed, is to offer students detailed insight into the languages they speak or hear around them, grounded in comprehensive coverage of the linguistic systems underpinning them. The book begins with "setting the stage" chapters, introducing the sociocultural context of the languages and dialects featured in the book. The remaining chapters are each devoted to particular U.S. dialects and varieties of American English, each with problem sets and suggested further readings to reinforce basic concepts and new linguistic terminology and to encourage further study of the languages and dialects covered. By presenting students with both the linguistic and social, cultural, and political foundations of these particular dialects and variations of English, Languages and Dialects in the U.S. is the ideal text for students interested in linguistic diversity in the U.S., in introductory courses in sociolinguistics, language and culture, and language variation and change.
Download or read book Cajun Literature and Cajun Collective Memory written by Mathilde Köstler and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-12-19 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does Cajun literature, emerging in the 1980s, represent the dynamic processes of remembering in Cajun culture? Known for its hybrid constitution and deeply ingrained oral traditions, Cajun culture provides an ideal testing ground for investigating the collective memory of a group. In particular, francophone and anglophone Cajun texts by such writers as Jean Arceneaux, Tim Gautreaux, Jeanne Castille, Zachary Richard, Ron Thibodeaux, Darrell Bourque, and Kirby Jambon reveal not only a shift from an oral to a written tradition. They also show hybrid perspectives on the Cajun collective memory. Based on recurring references to place, the texts also reflect on the (Acadian) past and reveal the innate ability of the Cajuns to adapt through repeated intertextual references. The Cajun collective memory is thus defined by a transnational outlook, a transversality cutting across various ethnic heritages to establish and legitimize a collective identity both amid the linguistic and cultural diversity in Louisiana, and in the face of American mainstream culture. Cajun Literature and Cajun Collective Memory represents the first analysis of the mnemonic strategies Cajun writers use to explore and sustain the Cajun identity and collective memory.
Download or read book Reclaiming the Local in Language Policy and Practice written by A. Suresh Canagarajah and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-01-15 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume inserts the place of the local in theorizing about language policies and practices in applied linguistics. While the effects of globalization around the world are being discussed in such diverse circles as corporations, law firms, and education, and while the spread of English has come to largely benefit those in positions of power, relatively little has been said about the impact of globalization at the local level, directly or indirectly. Reclaiming the Local in Language Policy and Practice is unique in focusing specifically on the outcomes of globalization in and among the communities affected by these changes. The authors make a case for why it is important for local social practices, communicative conventions, linguistic realities, and knowledge paradigms to actively inform language policies and practices for classrooms and communities in specific contexts, and to critically inform those pertaining to other communities. Engaging with the dominant paradigms in the discipline of applied linguistics, the chapters include research relating to second language acquisition, sociolinguistics, literacy, and language planning. The majority of chapters are case studies of specific contexts and communities, focused on situations of language teaching. Beyond their local contexts these studies are important for initiating discussion of their relevance for other, different communities and contexts. Taken together, the chapters in this book approach the task of reclaiming and making space for the local by means of negotiating with the present and the global. They illuminate the paradox that the local contains complex values of diversity, multilingualism, and plurality that can help to reconceive the multilingual society and education for postmodern times.
Download or read book Challenging Clitics written by Christine Meklenborg Salvesen and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2013-06-15 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging Clitics deals with multiple sides of cliticisation from different theoretical frameworks and with data from a number of different languages. Unlike many other books on clitics where clitics are considered from a mere syntactical point of view, this book also discusses the acquisition of clitics; the role of the PF in cliticisation; the morphophonological aspects of cliticisation; and historical change – to name but a few of the approaches presented. As such this collection presents cutting edge theoretical considerations as well as new data on clitics. Taken together, the contributions in this volume not only provide insight into the extremely complex nature of clitics, but also into derivations and structures in language that go beyond the study of clitics themselves.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the French Language written by Wendy Ayres-Bennett and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-07-08 with total page 1057 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides the first comprehensive reference work in English on the French language in all its facets. It offers a wide-ranging approach to the rich, varied, and exciting research across multiple subfields, with seven broad thematic sections covering the structures of French; the history of French; axes of variation; French around the world; French in contact with other languages; second language acquisition; and French in literature, culture, arts, and the media. Each chapter presents the state of the art and directs readers to canonical studies and essential works, while also exploring cutting-edge research and outlining future directions. The Oxford Handbook of the French Language serves both as a reference work for people who are curious to know more about the French language and as a starting point for those carrying out new research on the language and its many varieties. It will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students as well as established scholars, whether they are specialists in French linguistics or researchers in a related field looking to learn more about the language. The diversity of frameworks, approaches, and scholars in the volume demonstrates above all the variety, vitality, and vibrancy of work on the French language today.
Download or read book Louisiana History written by Florence M. Jumonville and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2002-08-30 with total page 810 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the accounts of 18th-century travelers to the interpretations of 21st-century historians, Jumonville lists more than 6,800 books, chapters, articles, theses, dissertations, and government documents that describe the rich history of America's 18th state. Here are references to sources on the Louisiana Purchase, the Battle of New Orleans, Carnival, and Cajuns. Less-explored topics such as the rebellion of 1768, the changing roles of women, and civic development are also covered. It is a sweeping guide to the publications that best illuminate the land, the people, and the multifaceted history of the Pelican State. Arranged according to discipline and time period, chapters cover such topics as the environment, the Civil War and Reconstruction, social and cultural history, the people of Louisiana, local, parish, and sectional histories, and New Orleans. It also lists major historical sites and repositories of primary materials. As the only comprehensive bibliography of the secondary sources about the state, ^ILouisiana History^R is an invaluable resource for scholars and researchers.
